He might've had his hands in his pockets. At the same time I heard another train come rattling up, but it didn't go by the shed mouth.
Hopkins followed me into the crowded little room, where the cylinders – big man and little man – stood in place. Lengths of rubber tubing were now connected to the taps on their tops, and these came together in the brass blowpipe that rested in Sampson's hands. It was a double gun, able to mix the two gases.
'Put that against the window,' he ordered when he saw me with the tarpaulin, so I moved around the desk. The thing was pretty stiff, and stood up of its own accord. I made a kind of cone of it, and it shut out the window pretty well.
'Good-o,' he said, so I'd got points for that, as well as everything else.
With stout leather gloves now on his hands, Sampson was removing his hat, putting on a pair of goggles. They were like the eye shades sometimes worn by the blind but they gave Sampson the look of one who could see everything, just as though they were a pair of giant black eyes. He had not troubled to protect his suit, which surprised me.
'Let's have the acetylene,' he said, looking at all of us at once. But it was the young man who answered the command. Taking his wrench or spanner he turned a nut on the smallest cylinder; there came a low whoosh, and Sampson lit a match, and put it to the end of the blowpipe. But the rushing gas simply blew it out. He tried again with a second match, obtaining the same result.
'Well I'd say you need a flint,' said the little clerk. 'You can't blow a spark out, you know,' he said, addressing me for some reason, 'instead of going out, it just blows away.'
Sampson turned his weird, goggle eyes towards the clerk.
He tried again with a third match. No go. I supposed that the room must be filling rapidly with the gas. It smelt like onions… fried onions.
Sampson tried a fourth match, and this one did the job, only the result was a let-down: a weak, ragged orange flame with a good deal of smoke into the bargain. I had expected the flame to be white, like the cylinder from which it came.
Sampson took a step to one side in surprise as the oxygen came, for the roaring increased ten fold, and the flame changed in an instant, both narrowing and lengthening into the shape of a sword. It was also now blue, and the young man at the cylinders was shouting over the roar: 'It's the light blue at the heart of it that does the cutting, mate.'
Sampson made no answer, but fell to his knees, and bent low over the safe, like a man praying. At the instant he touched the flame to the steel he was surrounded in a whirl of orange sparks. They flew about everywhere in the office, seeming to bounce and roll across the desk, quite able to survive an impact like game little acrobats.
It was hard not to think of this wonderful display as being the whole point of the exercise, and in fact Sampson did seem to be having some trouble with the cutting itself. He'd gouged a red groove across the face of the steel but as he moved the flame back and forth along it, the metal seemed to flow back into the trench, filling it in again, like time itself rolling forwards and backwards. The mark he'd made was no longer-lasting than a line drawn in sand. He looked up, once again staring at all of us and everything from behind the black lenses.
'Now he's thinking: maybe I ought to have spent ten minutes practising this,' said the little clerk, and the goggles turned once again in his direction.
The young man evidently called Tim was now at Sampson's shoulder. 'Don't touch the flame down so close,' he said, 'and go at it more at an angle.' He was so thoroughly in the know of the business that I wondered why he wasn't doing the job himself. But I supposed he would then have been a different order of helper, and liable to a longer sentence if caught.
The burning continued, and then there was an extra column of smoke, coming from beyond Sampson. The tarpaulin had caught light. The young man tapped Sampson on his shoulder, and yanked down the goggles, shouting straight at Hopkins, 'Water!'
At the window, the tarpaulin had slumped to one side, the flames beginning to creep across it from the corner place they'd started in.
The little clerk was shaking his head, saying: 'Beats all, that does.'
Hopkins looked across at me: 'You can give a hand,' he said, and we ranged out into the shed again.
'Where would you find water in a spot like this?' said Hopkins. I replied, 'How the bloody hell should I know?' but why had he asked me in the first place? Hopkins never called me Allan. Never believed it was my name, that's why.
Sampson was charging out of the office now, with the little clerk and the young bloke spilling out behind him. It was no longer possible to remain in there. 'Get a fucking shift on,' Sampson roared, 'the cylinders'll go up any second!'
'I can take a bucket to one of the water cranes outside,' I called to Sampson, but he wouldn't have that. There was nothing for it. If the cylinders blew we'd all be done for. I pointed down at the hydrant that lay at our feet. It was marked out for the engine cleaners by a square stone – there was even a canvas tube attached, though half buried in ash. I lifted the steel flap to get at the little wheel, which turned easily enough, and the tube stirred, leaping crazily three times as the water speed rose to its fastest. Sampson himself pointed the nozzle into the office, where the flames were quickly put out, and every light article sent flying by force of water in the process. The cylinders held their ground though: the big man and the little man, standing over the fallen safe.
Sampson and the young bloke fell to starting up the gas again, as we all crowded back into the little room – the floor of it was now a pond. The water continued to stream out of the hose in the shed beyond.
'Shouldn't have had a tarpaulin in here in the first place' the little clerk was saying. 'It was bound to catch. Half of it's tar, after all. Why do you think it's called a tarpaulin?'
I looked up to see that – as I had somehow suspected – he was addressing me again.
'What's that tap in the ground for?' he said, and I made no reply.
Sampson had the blowpipe lit once again, and was kneeling before the safe for a second go. If the flame was seen beyond the window, then it was just hard lines. Before he began, he called Hopkins across to him, and the two exchanged a few words while Sampson held the flame away. Then Hopkins motioned me and the clerk out of the room. 'Keep him pinned' Hopkins said to me, and so the two of us sat down on a sleeper that had been placed across the tracks behind one of the engines – the weird- looking Q Class. I wondered whether they had any particular reason to fear that the little clerk would take off. If they did have a reason, then why had they brought him along in the first place? They could have had the keys off him with no bother. But the answer was easy enough to guess at: they wanted him involved – make him a guilty party. And if he was sitting here in the South Shed, then he couldn't be chattering to the night-duty coppers at Tower Street. Hopkins had returned to his former pitch at the shed mouth, so that the little clerk was now in a double prison: I was guarding him, and Hopkins was guarding me. If I made a run for it, he'd call for Sampson, who'd shoot me. Well, perhaps he'd miss, but Sampson and Hopkins would do a push in any case with one man gone and liable to split. The cutting of the safe was continuing, with the door of the office kept open, so that I could see clear through toSampson as he worked away, like a magical figure in a cloud of bright sparks.
I thought I heard a church bell: three o'clock. But how could it be so late? I felt my eyes prickling. I ought not to be looking at the cutting flame. I remembered not to rub them by poking my finger directly through the frames of my glasses, but took the specs off first. It seemed as though my eyes were full of grit; and they felt better closed. I rested my head on my hand.
And then it was a different Sunday, late afternoon; darkness coming in to make sense of the gas lamps already lit across Sowerby Bridge, which rose on its bank above the engine yard. We'd run in light from Leeds – me and Terry Kendall. 'Grandfather Kendall', he was, to the blokes at the shed: the oldest driver on the goods link, or any link. The engine was 1008, the first of Mr Aspinall's radial tank engines, with bogies designed for making tight curves.
We were stood over a pit on an in-road, and it was one of those evenings with the coldness locked into the sky. No developments in the weather were imaginable.
I began lifting the fire out with the long clinker shovel, which was slightly bent a little way out of true, and when I'd done, I finished off the dregs in my tea bottle. Grandfather Kendall was fussing about somewhere near the front of the engine. I called out to him that the clinker shovel wanted replacing, and that I meant to go and see the toolman about getting another. He said 'Right enough' to that, and I went off. When I returned with afresh
